The very first intrigue at Alice, the uniquely vegetable-focused fine-dining restaurant that chef-owner Briana Kim opened in June, involves assuring yourself that you have come to the right address.

Hers is the place on a modest residential side street in Little Italy where marc | kitchen, and before that The Rex, had been. Kim, the self-taught, award-winning chef who represented Ottawa at the 2018 Canadian Culinary Championships, now presides inside a converted house with a new wood façade and a mini-greenhouse in front, but no sign of the restaurant’s name outside. To be clear, Alice is not the neighbouring property with an InfoWars sticker on its door, which has its own mysteries.

Briana Kim with some of her dishes at Alice Restaurant on Adeline Street in Little Italy. The exterior of the restaurant.Wayne Cuddington /
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When you enter Alice, the questions mount. Above all: What’s in those jars?

One wall of Alice’s front dining area is a clear cabinet filled with almost three dozen jars with oddly hued contents. Looking more closely, you discover that they contain the slowly fermenting materials of Kim’s cutting-edge cuisine — miso pastes made with sweet peas, chickpeas or sesame, vinegar-based creations involving crabapple flowers, Thai basil or spruce tips, concoctions made with jalapeño, morels, reindeer moss and even pine cones.

Fine-dining fans will know that fermentation is all the rage in the world’s top kitchens, from global leader Noma in Copenhagen down. With her jars, Kim shows she has gone all-in on fermentation as she takes her culinary artistry to the next level.

Kim’s previous and more casual restaurant, Café My House in Hintonburg, laid five years of groundwork for Alice.

But where Café My House, which Kim closed in January, was funky and dark, Alice, which seats 20 or so in its cosy, L-shaped, white-and-birch-coloured space, is ascetically spare. Only its jar-filled cabinet, a more artful wood wall that celebrates flowers in the rear dining area, the sleek bar that dispenses pricey but top-notch cocktails and the hubbub in the open kitchen distract from Kim’s rarefied dishes.

And where Café My House’s plant-based offerings included brunches on weekends and five-course tasting menus at dinner, Alice aims higher, serving just an eight-course, $95 tasting menu that can be paired with natural wines or alcohol-free house-made beverages for $60. (Cocktails, Burdock beer and Revel cider are also available.)

So, the investment and stakes are high for Kim’s most uncompromising project to date. I can say, though, after my meal there Saturday night, that Alice served a singular and fascinating dinner that surpassed two tasting-menu experiences I had had at Café My House.

Her food is supremely refined and arguably even virtuous, applying an ambitious chef’s devotion to highly creative and technical culinary transformations in the service of veganism and locavorism. The results are frequently visually stunning, marvellously thoughtful and not only delicious but deliciously novel.

Our dinner at Alice began with bread and snacks, with each counting as a course. But Kim’s approach made clear that Alice means to transport guests to a culinary wonderland.

Slices of warm, perfect sourdough came with a candle, which turned out to be “butter” made from creamy fermented rice, which was softening thanks to a burning walnut “wick.” For snacks, servers brought something scarcely cooked (a lightly charred summer radish, complete with its leaf, with cranberry bean miso that had been aged for three months) and an exquisite little pastry (a toasted sunflower seed and star anise butter tart with compressed plums and anise flowers).

Next came a bowl, and a table-side flourish. A sphere of coconut yogurt nestled with cranberry beans, and smoked, toasted and salted coconut flakes in a savoury broth. Kim then topped the dish with spoonfuls of an apparently supercooled powder flavoured with yuzu, the Japanese citrus fruit. Vapour, or probably nitrogen gas, billowed from the bowl.

As showy as the bowl was, it was even tastier. Bite after bite, it provided a refreshing play of sweetness, citrus, saltiness, textures and temperatures.

The dish seen here is Coconut, Cranberry Beans and Coffee.Wayne Cuddington /
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Alice’s elegant and visually arresting salad course will be very hard to displace from my memory. Kim had arranged assorted greens from Juniper Farms in a mini-bouquet, topped it with toasted flaxseed, other small, good things, and offset it with a ring of kohlrabi filled with sea buckthorn jelly. The salad’s dressing was fermented house-made almond milk, added in another table-side manoeuvre. The dish was simply revelatory.

The dish seen here is Summer Bouquet.Wayne Cuddington /
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The next two courses were increasingly savoury.

First came a geometric arrangement of circles and squares that starred cherry tomatoes, precisely topped with a red pepper-jalapeńo salsa, lacto-fermented basil and toasted freekeh, contrasted with a crisp, perforated smoked garlic chip and a ponzu-flavoured gel, as well as a fennel-spiced “butter” powder. If I’m right, the dish also included just enough subtle Sichuan-pepper-based oil to leave the faintest tingle on the tongue.

The dish seen here is Tomato and Ponzu.Wayne Cuddington /
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Eggplant was the star of the final savoury course, cooked so as to coax out its meaty mouthfeel. The slabs of eggplant were garnished with a variety of pickles and came with a deeply flavoured cucumber-based sauce. Nudging the dish over the top was a crisp ribbon that packed crunch and umami, I believe from a dusting of sea-vegetable powder.

Eggplant with cucumber sauce at Alicejpg

With these dishes, I had Alice’s alcohol-free pairings and was struck by their quality and even ingenuity. Among those drinks were glasses or cups of blackberry, hibiscus and mint kombucha, lime leaf lemonade, a warm, clear, super-savoury tomato tea, and a cool cucumber-ginger-cilantro tonic.

The first of two desserts combined house-made silken tofu with viscous elderberry honey and a scattering of fresh and freeze dried strawberries. It was good on its own but better still with its pairing, the strawberry sour topped with a vanilla and tonka bean “meringue.”

Strawberry, silken tofu and elderflower honey dessert at Alicejpg

The knockout dessert was the kitchen’s riff on an ice cream sandwich, that placed a quenelle of fermented-rice-based “ice cream” between shards of hyper-crisp oat cake, buttressed by berries in a charred pine cone syrup. Although I’m no fan of licorice, the licorice anise soda paired well with the dessert.

“ice cream sandwich” dessert at Alicejpg

Our meal ended with a mignardise — a house-made mint chocolate candy — and a keepsake copy of the menu, which abbreviated its descriptions of the dishes. Kim told us before we left that dishes come on and off the menu continually, and that roughly every six weeks there’s a new menu, to the delight of Alice’s repeat customers. Given that long-fermenting ingredients are involved, Kim is already planning winter dishes.

In all, Alice packed a striking amount of pleasant stimulation into our 95 minutes there. In fact, it’s possible the kitchen and staff were a little too efficient. Our meal could have felt a touch more relaxed in terms of pacing and delivery, and even more warm. But then, Kim and her team knew once I arrived that I was there in a critical capacity, and perhaps they switched to an overly professional, too-cool mode.

And for all the details they dispensed, Kim and her servers could have told us a bit more about the thinking behind the dishes — the “why” as well as the “what.” I’ve experienced that kind of curated dining at a Michelin-starred place or two, and found it gave a fuller appreciation of the food and the people who made it, enriching our experience and justifying the lofty prices.

Still, Alice serves notice that Kim is not simply a fine chef on Ottawa’s arguably under-appreciated dining scene, but an important culinary trailblazer worthy of recognition nationally and beyond. There are remarkable dishes to be discovered and demystified here now, and I expect there will be many more in the future.